s the rigors and routines of adult life go, paying the bills must rest somewhere on the list between going to the dentist and renewing your driver's license: You know it needs to be done, but there are certainly more enjoyable ways to spend your time.

For years, the self-service industry has worked to find the perfect way to make bill payment quicker, easier, more enjoyable and generate some revenue in the process. Today, bill-payment kiosks are beginning to take hold as a bona fide consumer trend; but interestingly, their paths diverge when it comes to the specifics of implementation.

Convenience above all

If you ask Jeff Lenard, he will tell you that the c-store industry practically invented self-service as a customer mindset. As the Director of Communications for the National Association of Convenience Stores, he points to the success of everything from pay-at-the-pump to help-yourself beverage dispensing as prime movers in the switch to self-service.

That first innovation came at a mighty high cost. Pay-at-the-pump remains a massive success, but it drastically decreased foot traffic within the stores themselves. Today's c-store Holy Grail is a way to get customers back inside.

"Margins being what they are, you only make a couple of cents per gallon on gasoline," Lenard said. "You make your money inside the store. You want to get customers to come inside the store, but you want them to want to do it as opposed to forcing them. The minute you force people to do something they don't want to do, you're inconvenient. We are not inconvenience stores."

Lenard and his colleagues see big potential in bill-payment kiosks, which allow customers to insert cash or checks and pay a variety of bills like utilities and wireless accounts. "It presents an enormous opportunity for stores where that type of service fits their core mission," he said. "Clearly, c-stores have gone from providing products only to providing products and services.

"Bill payments, or any type of service that can be conducted at a c-store, increase the likelihood that you will attract customers."

But c-store operators don't just want to add services, they want to add services that don't involve labor at the counter. They also want to take existing cash register services and move them to an automated device, like prepaid products and lottery sales.

"The whole idea of taking labor-intensive services away from the counter is definitely on our to-do lists," Lenard said. One of the most successful programs in this space is Info Touch Technologies' Tio system, which currently has kiosks in 542 c-stores in 18 states and British Columbia.

Hamed Shahbazi, Info Touch's Chairman and Chief Executive, said c-stores are a natural fit for the Tio program. "It's all in the 'c,'" he said. "The convenience aspect is the greatest value that the stores offer our customers. C-stores are easy to find, easy to park at, and are mostly open 24/7."

Another key benefit, Shahbazi said, is the fact that 30% of c-store patrons are unbanked or underbanked, and therefore are ideal users of bill-payment kiosks. Lenard acknowledged that the unbanked and underbanked are a big part of a c-store's clientele and added that kiosks like Tio are the best way to provide those customers with a "bank-like presence."

Shahbazi said Info Touch is constantly working to expand the network of vendors that can be paid through a Tio kiosk. And another big innovation is in the planning stages, he said: the integration of the Tio network with credit reporting bureaus, so that unbanked customers can build good credit by paying their bills on time. "There isn't a specific deployment date, but there will be more information coming soon," he added.

More traditional venues

The Tio network is sometimes referred to as an "aggregate bill-payment system," one in which multiple vendors are available on the same machine.

For Source Technologies, aggregate bill payment is a growth area for the future, but the company's emphasis until now has been dedicated, one-vendor, direct billing. Glen Fossella, Source's Vice President of Marketing, said that his company has more than 1,000 bill-payment kiosks deployed, with 98% of them serving a single vendor.

"We're just starting to experiment and test with the aggregate model," he said. "We recognize that some other folks are way ahead, that they've been doing this for a while.

"We'll be coming into the market a little bit late, but it's our expectation that we're going to play in that market. We obviously see the potential." Fossella said that even though Source will be competing with existing players in the aggregate bill-payment space, it won't necessarily be doing so on the same battlefields.

"We don't see it as just a c-store thing," he said. "We understand why that's the first place deployers look, because that's where the target market is. It seems a natural place for deployment. And from what we can see, the national c-store chains are very aggressive and very willing to test new ideas and new technology, so it makes sense that people are having initial success there."

But Fossella points to two other venues that he feels hold great promise: grocery stores and banks. He's particularly bullish on the latter, because many banks find themselves accepting bill payments at the teller window, with no revenue generated.

"This is a real challenge for retail banks and credit unions," he said. "Banks have this non-value-added activity that the tellers are engaged in, that they have to support on the back end." That means not only accepting payments but also dealing with the cash influx, keeping records and interfacing with the billing vendor. All of this, and they typically can't charge a fee.

In Fossella's view, banks will start to deploy bill-payment kiosks within their retail branches, moving traffic away from the teller window and making it possible for the banks to charge a fee for services that are currently provided at no charge. Customers benefit from being able to handle most of their regular monthly transactions with a single stop.

And once again, the topic of non-traditional banking customers arises. "The interesting question is, once banks start to deploy this capability for aggregate bill-payment in their branches, will they see the light when it comes to unbanked or underbanked folks?" Fossella asked.

"Will this just be for solving this one problem, or will they recognize that there's an opportunity to franchise an entirely new type of customer?"

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